An interesting piece up today on ReadWriteWeb on the growth and development of Facebook and how it’s changing the world. Some scary Godzilla/Hal/Ceylon overtones to blog writer Marshall Kirkpatrick’s characterizations, prompted by Facebook’s announcement today that it now has 250 million users. “If Facebook was a country,” writes Kirkpatrick, “it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. If it maintains this kind of growth there will be more Facebookers than people living in the United States by early November.” Kirkpatrick goes on to suggest that the way we interact with Facebook is now “shaping the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world,” and cites two examples of the social networking site’s cultural impact. One is privacy–Facebook is apparently trying to make the site (even) less private for its users by encouraging them to share their pages not just with Friends but with all 250 million Facebookers. The other is that, if I’m reading the piece in the right spirit (and believe me, I’m not), Facebook has the potential to go all Ceylon on our asses and like, take over. Or something.

Joking aside, the piece is worth checking out.Â Not that I’m afraid or anything. I still haven’t figured out the difference between posting on my own wall and posting on somebody else’s, so I have a long way to go before the application can get close enough to eat my brain or impregnante me with its spawn or whatever else its evil makers might be planning in their evil little mansions right now.